Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/392

 The Koreans will tell you that there lies buried in the sands on the southern coast the hull of the famous tortoise boat with which Admiral Yi Sun-sin won his famous naval battles over the Japanese, and Ensign George C. Foulk of the American navy, who was making a trip in southern Korea at the time of the emeute of 1884, told the writer that the remains of a boat were pointed out to him as being the authentic " tortoise boat." This was of course another case of vivid imagination on the part of the Koreans. It may be that there is more truth in the statement that in the storehouse of the old fortress of Namhan there lies the original mortar which the Koreans invented to throw bombs into the Japanese forts. The story of the invention of this weapon is told in all good faith, and the records say that when it was fired the whole thing leaped over the wall and fell among the Japanese soldiers; and when they crowded around to see what it was, it exploded and destroyed a score of men. It seems clear that they had some sort of weapon resembling the bomb and mortar, and if so they may have been the first inventors of it.

It is said that there is a cave about thirty miles south of Seoul called " The Death Cave." In the days of the great invasion, three centuries ago, about a thousand Koreans took refuge in this place, but the Japanese built a huge fire at its mouth and suffocated them all. Since that time no Korean has ever ventured into the cave for fear of the spirits of the dead.

Many questions have been asked about the tombs in which golden-coffined kings lie, and which the vandal Oppert came to rob in 1867. The Koreans say that Oppert and his crew were friends of the Roman Catholic priests who had been killed here the preceding year, and that Oppert came to rifle the grave of the father of the regent in revenge. This was not true. The expedition was a purely predatory one, and the object of it was to find the gold and treasure that were supposed to lie in the tombs on Tabong Mountain. The amusing thing about it is that these are not royal graves, but merely the place where,